A year ago, it would have been inconceivable for a citizen of Syria, run by the Baath Party of President Bashar al-Assad, to make a documentary film with the working title, "Fifteen Reasons Why I Hate the Baath."
Yet watching the overthrow of Saddam Hussein across the border in Iraq prompted Omar Amiralay to do just that. "It gave me the courage to do it," he said.
"When you see one of the two Baath parties broken, collapsing, you can only hope that it will be the turn of the Syrian Baath next," he added, having just completed the film, eventually called "A Flood in Baath Country," for a European arts channel. "The myth of having to live under despots for eternity collapsed."
When the Bush administration toppled the Baghdad government, it announced that it wanted to establish a democratic, free-market Iraq that would prove a contagious model for the region. The bloodshed there makes that a distant prospect, yet the very act of humiliating the worst Arab tyrant spawned a sort of "what if" process in Syria and across the region.
The Syrian Baath Party remains firmly in control, ruling through emergency laws that basically suspend all civil rights. The government says the laws are necessary as long as Israel occupies the Golan Heights, 40 miles from Damascus, and the two nations remain at war.
Yet subtle changes have begun, even if they amount to tiny fissures in a repressive state. Some Syrians are testing the limits, openly questioning government doctrine and challenging state oppression.
Syrians who oppose the government do so with some trepidation because it used ferocious violence in the past to silence any challenge. Yet the fall of Mr. Hussein changed something inside people.
"I think the image, the sense of terror, has evaporated," said Mr. Amiralay, the filmmaker.
On March 8, for instance, about 25 protesters demanding that repressive laws be lifted tried to demonstrate outside Parliament. Security forces squashed the sit-in as it started, but the event would have been unthinkable before the Iraq war.
People here do not know what previously locked doors they can push open, but they are trying to find out.
...
Anwar al-Bounni, a 45-year-old human rights lawyer, also senses shifts rippling through the country. Sitting at his desk in Damascus one recent night, he was fielding calls from Kurds across northern Syria reporting deadly clashes with government forces. Violence in the Kurdish areas makes the government nervous, fearful that Iraq's problems are spilling across the border.
Mr. Bounni has defended several Kurds arrested in high-profile cases for demanding greater minority rights. He recently received two summonses on the same day — signing the small paper chits that arrived at his cramped, low-ceilinged office by special messenger — from Military Intelligence and State Security. Both are among some 11 overlapping secret police organizations that Syrians loathe and fear.
Yet even the police act somewhat differently now.
...
Previously, Mr. Bounni noted, he would have been taken directly to jail for publicly demanding real political parties, a free press, fair trials or other civil liberties. The arresting officers would also have probably knocked him around, not treated him with a certain offhand civility.
"If the regime left today, there would be no one to run this country," he said. "There has been no political life for 40 years," he added, noting that the chaos in Iraq is largely the result of a similar void.
...
"I think maybe some in the regime want to return to those days; they are not comfortable that people speak out," he said. "I think they know the game is finished, at least I hope it is finished."
Others, some from surprising quarters, say similar things. Talk of reform can even be heard from radical breakaway Palestinian factions, still based here despite government denials. Most of the Palestinian offices are shuttered, their leaders asked to remain silent or to move.
One still operating is the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestinian, which was removed from the State Department list of terrorist organizations in 1999.
Nayef Hawatmeh, the group's leader and a gray-haired contemporary of Yasir Arafat, holds court in a shabby basement office. The front has played a minor role in Palestinian politics and in the fighting with Israel in recent years, claiming responsibility for some small-scale shooting attacks. Mr. Hawatmeh criticizes suicide bombings inside Israel.
If the region is full of despots, he points out, it is because the West long supported them. In the case of the Palestinians, the United States bet completely on Mr. Arafat while allowing him to build yet another totalitarian system, rather than promising a democratic state that all Palestinians would have supported wholeheartedly.
The Palestinian violence would dwindle, Mr. Hawatmeh said, if the United States forced a specific end to the Israeli occupation. Then Mr. Hawatmeh, aging anti-imperialist, a man who has benefited from Syrian hospitality for years, edges perilously close to sounding like a Bush administration spokesman.
"The Iraqis can see what they are going to get, what they struggled for during all the time under Saddam," Mr. Hawatmeh said. "The Iraqi people can see that the American occupation is not forever and reform will come in time."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/20/international/middleeast/20SYRI.html?pagewanted=1&hp
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